She sighed as she straightened her back.  A clock struck in another room.  It seemed to invite her towards discoveries.  She had been in no other room of the flat.  She knew nothing of the rest of the flat save by sound.  For neither of the other women had ever described it, nor had it occurred to them that Sophia might care to leave her room though she could not leave the house.

She opened her door, and glanced along the dim corridor, with which she was familiar.  She knew that the kitchen lay next to her little room, and that next to the kitchen came the front-door.  On the opposite side of the corridor were four double-doors.  She crossed to the pair of doors facing her own little door, and quietly turned the handle, but the doors were locked; the same with the next pair.  The third pair yielded, and she was in a large bedroom, with three windows on the street.  She saw that the second pair of doors, which she had failed to unfasten, also opened into this room.  Between the two pairs of doors was a wide bed.  In front of the central window was a large dressing-table.  To the left of the bed, half hiding the locked doors, was a large screen.  On the marble mantelpiece, reflected in a huge mirror, that ascended to the ornate cornice, was a gilt-and-basalt clock, with pendants to match.  On the opposite side of the room from this was a long wide couch.  The floor was of polished oak, with a skin on either side of the bed.  At the foot of the bed was a small writing-table, with a penny bottle of ink on it.  A few coloured prints and engravings —­representing, for example, Louis Philippe and his family, and people perishing on a raft—­broke the tedium of the walls.  The first impression on Sophia’s eye was one of sombre splendour.  Everything had the air of being richly ornamented, draped, looped, carved, twisted, brocaded into gorgeousness.  The dark crimson bed-hangings fell from massive rosettes in majestic folds.  The counterpane was covered with lace.  The window-curtains had amplitude beyond the necessary, and they were suspended from behind fringed and pleated valances.  The green sofa and its sateen cushions were stiff with applied embroidery.  The chandelier hanging from the middle of the ceiling, modelled to represent cupids holding festoons, was a glittering confusion of gilt and lustres; the lustres tinkled when Sophia stood on a certain part of the floor.  The cane-seated chairs were completely gilded.  There was an effect of spaciousness.  And the situation of the bed between the two double-doors, with the three windows in front and other pairs of doors communicating with other rooms on either hand, produced in addition an admirable symmetry.